October 4th 2004 - October 10th 2004
Sunday Shoon Yu
Saturday Seen all
Friday Saga
Thursday Say...
Wednesday Forward
Tuesday Secret
Monday Coarse not
Sunday 10th October 2004
I try to like Amy Lamé, really I do; it seems churlish not to, somehow, when you can see she's just seething with a lust to be loved. But, somehow, for me, it never takes.
I have to say I found her especially unlikeable last night at Duckie when, after patting herself on the back for procuring protracted Arts Council funding, she urged us to applaud one of the shortest, lamest acts I've seen lately: Charlie Hides's under-powered, ill-thought-out, and, ultimately, totally irrelevant portrayal of Laquisha Jonz.
Someone I do like, and I've made no secret of it, is the man known to us as Shouldn't-You (as previously discussed); he was, as he should be, at Duckie that same night, and our conversation progressed one slow stage further when I thought I caught a whiff of a foreign accent, and asked him where he was from.
There then ensued an annoying (for a know-all such as I) round of protracted guessing games, which, before his friend whisked him off, culminated in the minor revelation that there was something South East Asian in the mix.
Which kinda makes sense, in retrospect. In any case, I guess it means in future he'll be known to us as Shoon Yu.
Saturday 9th October 2004
So: I've used the snooze-button once or maybe twice more than I should have, and consequently have rather less time than I need to caffeinate, shave, dress and get to work.
So something has to give and it's a no-brainer which one to choose, given that, informal though it may be, our office doesn't yet turn a blind eye to people turning up naked.
So, although, given a following wind, this may well be one of those nights when we finish early enough for me to get to the Swan some time after midnight, I'm not especailly concerned about the fact that I have at least two days growth of, ahem, pepper-and-salt stubble because, like a boy scout, I always carry a disposable razor or two in my man-bag.
So the evening shift progresses without comment, and I get stuck with a relatively challenging role that means that if anyone's going to stand in the way of an early finish suddenly it's going to be me and that is so not going to happen, so I keep busy, busy, busy and don't ever quite find the time to pop to the executive washroom for a shave before I'm rushing out of the building at one thirty in the morning.
So, having made it through the doors of the Swan with time to spare, the first thing I do, before even ordering a pint, is take a trip to the Gents, the smaller one that's under-utilised at weekends but which, of course, tonight has at least three people who show no particular sign of leaving me alone to pare off my stubble in peace.
So, I'm standing there, sturdily scraping away at my chops without benefit of soap, let alone lather, running my disposable razor under the warmish water from the tap, pulling my face about in front of the small cracked mirror.
That does not give you license, mr arsehole midlde-aged bumbandit, to snort on your way out and exlaim: "Now I've seen everything!"
If that's your everything, you really do need to get out more.
Friday 8th October 2004
I don't know about you, but on public transport my preferred reading is The London Review of Books: it folds up small enough to fit in my pocket, the print is just about large enough to read without glasses if I hold it close enough to my face, and the intellectual density of its content is sufficient to stop me drifting off towards either of the twin poles of psychic danger that characterise underground travel, namely urban paranoia or unlicensed sexual fantasy.
Plus, ok I admit it, I do kinda like what it says about me: I may not be the most well-turned out or best-groomed of your fellow passengers but at least I can cope with words of more than three syllables. Looking over my shoulder, you noticed that what I was reading had an awful lot of words and no pictures? Ha! Wait till I turn the page: this bit doesn't even have a headline, sucker!
Imagine, then, my conflicted feelings when, settled in the relative emptiness of the penultimate carriage of a southbound Jubilee line train, just past Green Park at around nine thirty in the evening, I detected, over the top of my current copy, one of a group of neatly-dressed middle-aged men staring rather hard at whatever was staring back at him from the page that was folded away from me.
Especially when he turns to his equally tweedy neighbour, mutters "See...advertising...Sweden...years ago" and points, points!, at me and my London Review.
I concentrate harder on a rather demanding critique of Gilles Deleuze's views on the aesthetic of Francis Bacon ("His 'Figure' is a way of coming at abstraction, or at least at non-figuration; what he wants to do with it is to think 'sensation' differently"), whilst part of my brain goes, "Sweden? In the LRB? My God, it's got to be an ad for some oldies' cruise. He's mentally filing me as a potential fellow traveller on a Saga hoiiday. The agony! The shame!"
And then we pull into Victoria, and the middle-aged gents and their lady wives disembark, and I turn over to see what all the fuss is about, and it's an ad for a book called In Search of the Absolute - essays on Swedenborg and Literature.
So that's all right then.
Thursday 7th October 2004
Mr President, could we talk about the fact that it's now widely acknowledged that the weapons of mass destruction that you utilised to justify your war on Iraq simply never existed?
Sure..say, did you see how those cheese-eaters were taking bribes from Saddam all that time?
Wednesday 6th October 2004
Let me give you that address again...
Factcheck.org is the site that Vice-President Cheney meant to cite when he urged voters to use the internet during the vice-presidential debate last night. Unfortunately, he named it as factcheck.com - a site owned by a consortium of magazine publishers who are now busily forwarding all callers to George Soros' anti-Bush website.
Tuesday 5th October 2004
There's good news and bad news, Mr Bigley. The good news is that we have a new team of secret agents working on your case. The bad news? They're Italian.
Monday 4th October 2004
I know what it means; I know what it ought to mean
Fustian: - A coarse fabric woven from discarded mustache hair
......previous week
